I am very impressed with this - nice clean design and everything works great. The new album interface (where it spreads the dominant color of the album cover across the screen) looks beautiful. I am using it on OSX but will look forward to checking it out on Windows (I installed it on my work computer yesterday but was called into a meeting before I could check it out).

It's really just an inconvenience as there's still a back button, but I'm a bit of a stickler when it comes to the user experience... especially when the update was all about addressing said experience!

Although, it's definitely odd that the back button on my mouse doesn't work at all, and backspace works, but not correctly. I was at the following pages... app updates > app 1 > app updates *clicked back button* > app 2 ... and when I hit backspace from app 2's page, it brought me back to app 1, which if you think of iTunes like a browser (it really is), app 1 shouldn't even exist in my history anymore since I hit back and went to another page.

I've never really understood the iTunes hate nor have I had it be so unmanageable that it ruins the experience. With that, I am usually a little bewildered when people make it sound like iTunes ran over their dog while running off with their missus!

The new album interface (where it spreads the dominant color of the album cover across the screen) looks beautiful.

Click to expand...

I thought it was nifty, but I did notice a few albums where it chose a color that I wouldn't use. I think it looks at the edge of the album and chooses the most common color.

For Andy Blueman's Sea Tides EP, it used the dark blue where I would choose black since the album is far more black on the left side and that's where the opaque color exists (album cover goes on the right side). For Disturbed's The Sickness, it uses that turquoise color, which looks rather odd when combined with all the black on the left side. If they didn't mind wasting more processing power, I wouldn't mind seeing a bit more advanced processing. For example, the albums that I posted above tend to have a staunch difference between the left and the right side, so if iTunes detects this, it uses a gradient instead.

There were plenty of albums that had a singular color around the outside and those looked fine. It also creates a faded, mirrored image of the album cover if there are a lot of songs and the expanded view needs to be larger. I ran into this with a few Ferry Corsten albums.

What problem are you seeing? I'm not sure when I downloaded it or what I did to download it, but I was able to get the new Anandtech podcast through iTunes. I checked to make sure it wasn't some weird streaming link, and it's definitely on my PC as an ~85MB MP4.

I like the new UI, for the most part. Like has been mentioned above, I like the Album display with the changing color based on the cover art. It's neat!

I am having trouble with a couple of album though that's previously shown just fine but now suddenly the album title is shown as 'unknown'. I looked at the tag and it's showing the album title correctly. I even went as far as finding the original CD and re-ripped the whole thing, and still it's shown as 'unknown'. I'm scratching my head here.

Had a chance to play with it. My main gripe with iTunes was always the speed of the whole application. It always felt like it was lagging.

iTunes 11 feels snappier. It still is slow to load all graphical elements on the new "page" you are navigating to but it doesn't seem like it's taking forever to start the process.

The new UI is different but not functionally better than before for the most part. Little quirks to the UI that makes it feel different even if it's extremely similar.

One major improvement is manually managing the installed apps on your iOS device from iTunes. I do this because of storybook apps for my kids that I will switch out so it's not the same stories all of the time. Some of them are quite large with dual languages. Manually managing the apps is similar to the old way but much improved. There was a scrolling bug that I always hit if you have a large list of apps that seems fixed.

There are still some rough edges on this re-design but it does feel like they rebuilt it from the ground up.

iTunes 11 completely obliterates any music player I've ever used on Mac or PC in terms of functionality now. It all just works and is incredibly intuitive. I highly suggest you upgrade if you haven't already.

Going back to Winamp after this makes me want to cry. This is how music libraries were meant to be explored. My only issue with the Retina MBP, which I have, is that the graphics card is still not able to completely deliver a smooth and fluid experience with iTunes.

Yeah, it sounds like they've really under-powered the Retina MBPs for what the screen actually needs. They need better GPUs so it doesn't get so worked up just trying to display applications and websites.

I didn't notice it at first, but the album selection not only selects a color from the album art to form the background, but the character coloring is also chosen from colors in the album art. Interesting....

Moderator

Did they get rid of that iTune's DJ? I can't seem to find it and it annoys me greatly!

Click to expand...

Remind me again was iTunes DJ was.

They added the ability to queue up any songs you wanted, which may have replaced it. But I thought that was replacing Party Mode, whatever that was. Queuing up the songs as I go is a feature that Windows Phone had that I loved.

You're listening to a song, and you like this song. And you think 'Man, you know what would go good after this song?? THAT song' So you go to find it, and instead of having to wait for the song to end and then switching to it, you just add it to the playing list as the next song.

They added the ability to queue up any songs you wanted, which may have replaced it. But I thought that was replacing Party Mode, whatever that was. Queuing up the songs as I go is a feature that Windows Phone had that I loved.

You're listening to a song, and you like this song. And you think 'Man, you know what would go good after this song?? THAT song' So you go to find it, and instead of having to wait for the song to end and then switching to it, you just add it to the playing list as the next song.

Click to expand...

It was the thing that created dynamic playlists and could be tuned to play higher rated songs more frequently. The thing that made it so good as I didn't have to go through the entire playlist to get a song I like to play again. It functioned a lot more like a radio stations where the "hits" were in rotation more than the "unknowns" songs. It was just an organic playlist. Sometimes you would get the same song twice in a row or within the next 5 or so songs, but if it is a song you like, who cares?

I didn't notice it at first, but the album selection not only selects a color from the album art to form the background, but the character coloring is also chosen from colors in the album art. Interesting....

Click to expand...

True, this is damn cool. I usually have iTunes hidden, but graphical kicks like this are cool even if I usually don't see them. This just looks... really well-executed. I know this is probably one of the easiest examples that I could pick since it's a 3-color album cover, but if it works half this well on half of my albums then it will be worth it.

True, this is damn cool. I usually have iTunes hidden, but graphical kicks like this are cool even if I usually don't see them. This just looks... really well-executed. I know this is probably one of the easiest examples that I could pick since it's a 3-color album cover, but if it works half this well on half of my albums then it will be worth it.